DUST DEVILS

Story by Ken McCall and photos by Aaron Mayes - Las Vegas Sun

Wearing ski goggles, Steve Metzger peers through his windshield across the sweltering Eldorado Valley.

In the shimmering distance a swirl of dust begins to rise. As the apparition twists into a full-blown dust devil, Metzger jerks his truck into gear and charges off across the sun-baked dry lake bed.

This isn't just any truck, however. It's festooned with and crammed full of $80,000 of the Desert Research Institute's best meteorological equipment.

Suspended on a 25-foot boom jutting out in front of the truck are instruments that measure air pressure, wind speed, air temperature, precise geographical location and the relative density of dust in the air.

Like an armor-clad lancer charging a ghostly dragon, Metzger races toward the dust devil until the boom pierces the undulating wall.

In that wall is where the dust is and it's the dust in the devil that the graduate research assistant is studying.

The instruments take their measurements and relay them into a laptop computer sitting on the seat beside Metzger. When the dust devil dissipates, he drives back to his base next to U.S. 95, downloads the data and puts a new filter in the dust-collecting vacuum. He'll analyze the contents of the filters later.

Metzger became interested in dust devils while doing research on the Nevada Test Site. He was studying how much "nasty dust" the wind might be blowing off the old nuclear testing range.

While a portable wind tunnel failed to stir up much of anything, Metzger noticed that dust devils would sweep by kicking up all kinds of material.

So he proposed his current experiment. "I want to find out how much dust it moves," he said. It will be months before his data is analyzed, but Metzger said he's already sure of a few things:

"Dust devils happen more often than we thought, in more places than we thought and they pump a lot of dust in the air." That dust can have a lot of effects on human beings - none of them good. For one thing, he said, a lot of this dust is made of salts distilled from the water of the long-gone lake. "And salts," he said, "dissolve when they hit a moist surface, like your lungs." Other dust, meanwhile is made up of "chunky bits of rock," which aren't good for the lungs either.

In addition, dust is a critical ingredient in the formation of smog and it plays a part in the greater picture of global warming. "The global climate change discussion needs to know the sources of dust," he said. There hasn't been any research on the dust devils, however, since the 1960s, Metzger said, and nothing with the kind of instrumentation he's assembled.

On a tour of his scientific gadgetry, Metzger speaks of 3-D sonic anemometers and differential GPS locators. But a close inspection of the apparatus supporting the sensitive and valuable instruments reveals that it's held together with hose clamps and duct tape.

This, Metzger says, should be no surprise. "Without gray tape," he deadpans, "science itself would be impossible." One thing that's clear, though: Metzger is having a great time out here on this Godforsaken dry lake.